Because the 1520 is just too big. Otherwise I really like it in a lot of ways – high def screen, easy to read content, very fast, slot for MicroSD card.

But it doesn’t fit nicely into my pockets, and it is very awkward to hold up to my ear when talking (yes, I often use BlueTooth, but not always).

Mostly though, even with my big hands (I’m 2m tall after all) I can’t use it one-handed. <insert texting while driving jokes here> In reality this has nothing to do with driving as I have a good hands-free setup in my truck. This has to do with normal everyday use of the phone, and the reality that it never works one-handed, even for basic things like pulling it out of my pocket to answer a call.

I have high hopes for the 1020. It is the size of my 920, which I loved, and has a much better camera. I don’t believe it has a MicroSD slot though, which is the only real negative I can see.

In my last post my focus was on listing the numerous WinRT apps I use on a regular basis – many of which, if I couldn’t get them on Win8 would drive me to carry an iPad. I’m personally not just a software developer, I’m a user of computing as well.

One line, a sensation-maker, in my post was that I think Windows developers who aren’t using WinRT apps are doing their ultimate users a disservice. This doesn’t apply to web developers or other people who aren’t developing actual Windows applications, but it surely applies to people living today in the legacy WPF, SL, and Windows Forms technologies.

The thing is, I made no effort to describe why I believe that to be true, because the focus of that post was to list useful apps.

So what did I mean by that comment?

Here’s the thing. As someone who does use a lot of WinRT apps I can say that a lot of them suck. I’ve divided the suckage into three categories.

Some apps are obviously built by pure mobile developers, who have no comprehension of keyboard/mouse or productivity on anything but a tablet. So their apps are sometimes pretty good on a tablet, but are virtually useless on a laptop or desktop. Because I use all three types of device with pretty much every app, I find that these mobile-only or mobile-first apps just suck. I might use them on my tablet, but they are always pretty secondary to more complete apps because they aren’t universal.

Other apps are obviously built by pure desktop developers, who have no comprehension of touch. These apps often work pretty well with keyboard/mouse, but are awkward to use with touch. Technically they work on my tablet, but they aren’t fun or efficient, and so I consider them to suck.

The third group of sucky apps are built by people with no WinRT user experience. These apps might, in theory, work pretty well with touch and/or keyboard and mouse, but they miss the point of all the cool WinRT features. They don’t use AppBars or the Share charm or Settings or Search correctly. They don’t use dialogs correctly, they don’t use navigation correctly. I’m sure the authors of these apps often think they are being clever by inventing their own techniques, but as a user their apps just suck because they don’t work right.

In short, sucky apps come from three sources:

Mobile developers who don’t consider laptop/desktop device scenarios

Desktop developers who don’t consider tablet scenarios

Developers who are ignorant about the WinRT environment and don’t understand how it works

So as a developer, if you plan to ever build WinRT apps and you aren’t using WinRT then you are pretty much guaranteed to fall into category 3, and very possibly 1 and/or 2.

Hence, if you are a smart client developer – unless you are planning to retire on WPF (which is fine) or switch to the iPad/Android world, you are doing yourself and your users a disservice if you aren’t actually using and learning “the WinRT way”.

Update:

Jason Bock mentioned something to me that got me thinking. I base all of this on one core assumption:

Win32 has no long-term future as a mainstream technology.

To be clear, I am 100% sure Win32 will be around for the next 20-30 years, just like mainframes and minicomputers are still with us – usually hidden behind the scenes or in a terminal window, but still here. I don’t think anyone would call them “mainstream” though. Nobody ever mentions IBM in the same breath as Microsoft/Apple/Google/Samsung.

Now if you think Microsoft will back off from WinRT, and by some miracle Apple and Google and Samsung will just completely fail to adapt iOS, Android, or ChromeOS to the enterprise, then you can imagine yourself still doing Win32 as a mainstream technology in 5-7 years.

I personally can’t imagine that happening. I think 5 years from now Win32 will be pretty much what we think of as VB6 today. Something that runs a ton of software, and something that people still do, but not something that would be considered mainstream or vibrant.

For my part, I think that if Microsoft does back off WinRT to try and rejuvenate Win32 … well … that’ll be the opening one or more competitors needs to swoop in and take the enterprise desktop.

I thought I’d post a list of the top Windows 8 WinRT (windows store) apps that I use all the time.

I know a lot of people who are running Win8 and treating it like Win7 – never leaving the legacy Desktop if at all possible. I think those people are doing themselves a disservice, and in the long run if they are developers then they are doing their users a disservice. I say this because I view the Desktop today in the same light I viewed green screen terminals in the early 1990s – a necessary evil that will ultimately fade into the mists of time (except for those poor users who will forever be stuck using legacy apps).

So these are the apps that, if they didn’t run on Win8, would probably drive me to get an iPad or Android tablet (except that because they are on Win8 I can use them on my tablet AND on my desktop, which is extremely nice). For the most part these are pinned on my start screen on my tablet and desktop. I’ve bolded the WinRT apps and left the legacy Desktop apps unbolded so it is clear just how much I use WinRT.

Productivity:

Mail, Calendar, People – the standard apps/hubs that come with Win8 – they started out bad, but have become quite good

Outlook (desktop) – I only use this to schedule Lync meetings anymore, but can’t live without it until there’s an alternative way to schedule a Lync meeting

Yahoo Mail – I use yahoo as my spam dump, but occasionally scan through to see if anything real creeps into that mail box

The Modern Apps Live! conference is coming up soon. Not only am I speaking at this event, but I’m the conference chair so I had the privilege of laying out all the content for the show.

This is the third Modern Apps Live! event and I think it offers something you won’t find in many (any?) other conferences. It is a single track, a single room. The content builds on itself through the entire conference. If you stick with us for the whole show we’ll walk you through the entire process of architecting, designing, and implementing a modern app.

What is a modern app? We define it as an app that has a compelling user experience that is available across all modern devices (Windows, iPad, Android, HTML 5) and that provides the user with a great touch/keyboard/mouse experience as appropriate for each device. A modern app’s data is ubiquitous, so it follows you from device to device, providing a consistent experience and access; as you can imagine, this implies a cloud-based back end system.

The great thing is that Modern Apps Live! is part of the Live 360! event, so if you want to branch out you’ll have full access to all the Visual Studio Live!, SQL Live!, and SharePoint Live! sessions as well.

There’s still time to register for Modern Apps Live! in Las Vegas, and I hope to see you there!

I’ve been fighting these spammers for years, and they’ve cost me ridiculous amounts of time and money over that time.

The fact that these inherently evil people are now asking me to spend more of my time and money to resolve some issue they brought on themselves is hilarious!

Now maybe if they’d offered me a bunch of money – enough to cover my time now to remove the links, plus enough to cover all the hours I’ve spent fighting their spam over the years – I’d be motivated to “help” them.

As it is, I find that I’m highly motivated to do two things:

Use these people as public examples of evil in the hopes that few enough people will ever use their services that they go out of business

Leave their spam in my web site as long as the Google ranking harms them by my actions

(what’s even funnier is that their spam is in a fake user profile, not in the actual forum, and the spammer that created that user profile has the password and could thus clean up the spam themselves – I think these national positions people should just pay their spammer to clean up the mess – that would be pretty funny too :) )

Sometime in the past we were paying a company for a link building campaign for our website. At the time, we didn't know what kinds of links they were building, and we were assured they would help our rankings. We are now in a situation where these links are causing a Google penalty on our domain.

We have identified which links we believe could be causing this, and we found your domain is hosting links we need removed.

I would greatly appreciate it if you removed all of the links to http://www.nationalpositions.com from your domain. Here is an example of the URLs hosting the links:

I’ve had my Nokia Lumia 1520 “phablet” for around 6 hours now and thought I’d record my earliest thoughts.

(phablet is a term used to describe a huge phone, big enough to be a small tablet – hence “phablet”)

Good:

The phone is as solid and well built as other Lumia devices

Even though it is bigger than my 920 I don’t think it weighs much more; not what I expected from such a large device

From what I’ve seen thus far, the battery doesn’t go down unless I run the Waze app (which drains batteries even if your phone is plugged into a charger)

Reading email, browsing, and other data consumption activities are a lot of fun on the bigger screen

Not only is the screen bigger, it is 1080p so it is so clear and sharp! Watching Hulu Plus and NetFlix on this thing is nice!!

Moving from one WP8 device to another is a breeze; all my data and apps are in the cloud so the new phone just spent a while downloading everything and it just worked!

Neutral:

The GDR3 “Black” update auto-installed on startup, and of course it has nice features all by itself, but I had that on my 920 already

Though the device is quite large, I mostly talk via BlueTooth headsets or Microsoft Sync in my truck, so I haven’t yet encountered any awkward moments of holding a phablet up to my ear

Bad:

Stupid AT&T prevents the Data Sense app from installing to the device; my 920 was a developer device and so it wasn’t blocked (even on ATT), and I really, really, really miss having Data Sense already (yes, they say I should use the myATT app, but I’m on a corporate plan so that app is total junk, and even if it did work it wouldn’t show the useful info shown by Data Sense)

The screen is so big that even with my massive hands I can’t really use the device with one hand

A small number of apps from the 920 apparently can’t run on the 1520, though that could be related to me moving from an unlocked dev phone to an AT&T branded device where they appear to cripple some things

Though the battery life seems to be excellent, charging the battery takes _forever_ – or I’ve got a bad device, because it has been charging for a really long time and isn’t fully charged yet (and no, the Waze app isn’t running in the background :) )

The device is big enough to be somewhat uncomfortable in the front pocket of my jeans, so I’m trying the back pocket; hopefully I don’t accidentally sit on it and break the phone…

On Waze:

Twice I mentioned the Waze app. It is a wonderful app if you need to get somewhere through traffic, snowstorms, etc. The user-driven data sourcing for traffic and related events is all in realtime, and I’ve found that Waze gets me around traffic that other GPS apps (even with traffic data) wouldn’t avoid.

BUT, the Waze app does literally drain the battery on phones even when plugged into a charger, so it is something you can _only_ use when the phone is plugged into a charger, and even then only for a relatively short period of time (such as on your commute to/from work). Even then, I suspect it would totally drain a battery with a longer commute like people have in some cities…

Thanks to this post I learned something useful that addresses some of my concerns. Specifically that there is an “Xbox Music” app in the Windows Phone store that you can download for free. Rather than updating the built-in music app in the phone, they created a new one and nobody told me :)

This new Xbox Music app is pretty much comparable to the Windows 8 app, including the following:

You can view music in the cloud, on the device, or both

Playlists sync between WP8 and Win8

This addresses several of my complaints (around lack of playlists and playing every song twice).

It still doesn’t explain why the Xbox Music app on Win8 often mutes when it isn’t in the foreground (but sometimes works as expected). Nor does it alleviate the lack of music videos on the Xbox One compared to the 360.

But at least I can now use my phone to listen to music while at cardio rehab, and that was my single biggest desire.

Original:

I really like (or used to like) the Zune client and zune.net service, which were sort of renamed Xbox Music.

And even after the rename and changes the Xbox Music service is pretty good in some ways.

But there are some key things that are just plain broken – to the point I’m thinking about dropping the service. These are my complaints:

On the Xbox 360 the Xbox Music app had something called “Smart VJ” that played music videos; this is gone on the Xbox One, thus eliminating the primary reason I used Xbox Music on the actual Xbox (there’s no VEVO app for Xbox One either, so basically no music videos available at all – good thing I still have my 360!)

On Windows Phone 7 I could sync my music to the phone; on WP8 I can copy my music to the phone via the file system, but all my “cloud music” shows as duplicated on the phone, so I hear almost every song twice (or if there’s no data signal every other song errors out when the phone tries to play it) – basically the experience makes the phone virtually useless for music (some more info about the broken cloud music feature is here: http://winsupersite.com/article/windows-phone-8/windows-phone-8-tip-xbox-cloud-collection-144703)

I have to create playlists for my phone on my phone, which is tedious at best, especially compared to creating a playlist on a computer; this problem didn’t exist in WP7 And thanks to the nasty cloud collection behavior, creating a playlist automatically is kind of useless for when I want to listen offline (like on an airplane, or when I’m at physical therapy in the basement of the hospital where there’s no cell service)

There’s no “Smart DJ” feature on Windows 8 if you are offline – even if you have a couple thousand songs physically on your computer; the lowly Zune HD device didn’t have this problem, but my super-powerful and much more modern Surface Pro can’t pick its own music when offline?

About half the time the Xbox Music app on Windows 8 mutes the sound when the app is in the background – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – seems pretty buggy to me

Basically, compared to the original Zune and zune.net behaviors the Xbox Music clients and service are a major step backwards.

Is anyone using some online/offline music service or player that does work on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8? Something that:

Creates smart playlists using music that’s on the device

Doesn’t duplicate music that’s on the phone and is in the cloud (so doesn’t play every song twice)

Doesn’t attempt to play cloud-based music while offline

When online does give streaming access to a huge song library

Plays music on Windows 8 without muting when the app is in the background (Pandora is broken like this, and Xbox Music is unreliable in this regard)

Allows me to download otherwise-streaming music for a playlist if I want that music offline (one of the things Xbox Music does well)

I know I might be an outlier, wanting to listen to music when I have no data service (or when I don’t want to burn my cell data plan down). And maybe I should just get an iPod and be done with it – but then I’d have to install iTunes on my computer, and last time I did that I was far from satisfied either…

CSLA 4 version 4.5.500 is officially released and is available via nuget or from www.cslanet.com.

This version includes some major new capabilities, including:

Support for Windows Runtime 8.1, including substantial updates to the Csla.Xaml namespace and controls

Support for Android via Xamarin using the latest version of Xamarin tools

Support for EF6

Support for ASP.NET MVC 5

Improved support for using IoC containers in the server-side data portal

The installer now includes a .chm file for the Csla.dll assembly

This version also includes a number of bug fixes and minor feature enhancements.

CSLA 4 allows you to create a powerful object-oriented business layer that encapsulates all your business logic. That business logic can then be reused across multiple UI technologies and platforms, including:

Windows 8 (WinRT)

WPF

ASP.NET (MVC, Web Forms, and Web API)

WCF

Android (via Xamarin)

Windows Forms

Windows Phone 8

Silverlight 5

The ability to literally write one set of business logic code that can be reused across all these UI and platform technologies is extremely powerful, and provides you with flexibility to support multiple client platforms, or to move from one technology to another over time without having to rewrite your entire application.